Elf Portrait
by Yveta
Summary: Chandler hates Christmas shopping, and running into a familiar face doesn't exactly help. Not at first, anyway.
1. Chapter 1

It's hot, that's the first thing I notice. Much, much hotter than it seemed through the lens of the windows. It's warm and thick, so I can barely breathe, making me desire to unwrap myself from my layers and leave them to pool on the floor behind me. I can imagine it now, as though I see it before me, framed into reality. I imagine removing my coat, feeling its humid weight pushing itself from my shoulders before melting into a black puddle behind me, with just the occasional trickle of the red lining. Fresh air would blow down my collar, its chill fingers working their way down my neck and back, cooling as they go. If only imagining made it so, but my powers of invention can only get me so far. My tie, I need to loosen my tie. But I am Joseph Chandler, and I do not undo in public.

The heat mocks me, like it knows I am a winter man. There is a comfort in the cold – it asks nothing of you, only that you respect it. It doesn't demand your flesh, and it allows you to hide yourself in its pockets, shrugging down low, because everyone else does the same. It was winter a moment ago, frosty and safe, before I came inside, entering through the glass doors that fail to do the one thing that doors are made to do, which is to close and remain closed. These doors slide open with their panorama at the whim of any oscillating passer by, or wayward child teasing the doorway. I myself stood on the threshold for several minutes while they attempted to second-guess my intentions, opening and shutting like a questioning mouth.

 _Well? Are you coming in or aren't you?_ they might have been saying. As usual, I had no answer to give. Eventually, the decision was taken from me by a jostle and a trip, and now here I am, in what feels like some sort of luminescent sauna, where everything drips with festive heat. The fake snowflakes hang heroically, stubbornly unmelted, despite existing in a temperature more suited to August. The tinsel sags and the music gurgles like water stuck in a pipe.

I am a man out of place here. I may be suited to the season of winter, but not Christmas. I like my lights singular, not assorted or wrapped like twine to border a severed tree, or (god forbid) twinkly. I've no issue with the season of goodwill per se – it's just all the trimmings I can't stand. The sheer misery of being happy. Of painting on a joyful smile to please other people while you try not to drown yourself in eggnog. (I don't even like eggnog – give me a vodka any day.) I'm not a scrooge, I will chip in for a Christmas party for the team, as long as I don't have to attend. I just prefer my own company.

My head flops around my neck to take in the scene around me. The air feels like a sultry soup, saturated with perfumes, cloying scents, sugary and sweet. I appear to have wandered into the part of the store that dedicates itself to the sense of smell, and it has taken on that devotion with enthusiasm. Different fragrances war with each other to grab my attention – I turn one way and I am overpowered with florals, if I face a different direction, there are spices and fruits and something cutting that might be alcohol. I dare say that, individually, these decorative bottles contain pleasant aromas. But like Christmas carols, you only want to experience one at a time. The alternative is to be smothered by musk, overcome by distilled plants. I've never had to buy perfume for anyone, and I don't think I intend on starting today.

I don't really know what I'm doing here.

It's all Miles' fault. He told everyone that my birthday was coming up last month, making them all feel obliged to mark it in some way. The whisky was agreeable, although it didn't last long, and I had to find space to display the cards, to reroute my desk to allow for all the extra furniture. And then there was Kent, wriggling, squirming into my office, shiny green bag in hand, the roped handles offering themselves on his fingers. He had stood in a similar stance, shoulders nudging his ears, the previous week when he and the rest of the team had been working late on a case and somehow we had all decamped to my flat. I'm still not quite sure how that happened – Miles was probably to blame again. He usually is. In the end, it wasn't as invasive an experience as I might have expected – everyone settled down to work quite naturally, fitting themselves around my table as though they were the well-apportioned outfit it had been missing. For all they had appeared to care, I might as well not have been there. Only Kent had seemed at all uncomfortable, and he was the only one whose presence I remained constantly aware of.

He often seems uneasy around me – I can't explain it. And his awkwardness seems to float through the air where it is inhaled by myself, infectious, a veritable virus of anxiety. It was the same on the afternoon of my birthday.

"I… er… I noticed you didn't have many pictures up in your flat," he said by way of explanation, proffering the glossy gift bag. "And maybe you like it that way, so… umm… don't feel you have to accept this. But if you maybe wanted to start putting some photos or something up, then I thought you might like a frame. So… umm… yeah… here. Happy birthday, sir."

The office was stuffy, which was odd, because I'm fairly sure I had turned the heating off a few hours earlier. The outlines of Kent's fingers were stencilled onto the bag's sheeny surface, silhouetted in sweat or condensation, and his hands were clammy as they glanced against mine. That would normally have bothered me, so it's interesting that I didn't mind the soft lick of knuckles as he delivered his gift to me. Perhaps it was because my hands were also stifling in their own warmth. There was a ripple of black ink blossoming on his index and middle finger from hours spent note-taking with a leaky pen. It is by now an almost indelible tattoo testifying to his work. Whatever else I might say about DC Emerson Kent, he is the hardest worker here, and has for a long time been one of my most reliable and valued officers. I don't think it's too much to say that I wouldn't have survived my first week here without his support. He wears that ink stain like a medal. But there's a part of me that sees a sadness in the smudge. It spreads like a black hole across his hand, empty and hollow. Maybe I'm overthinking (it wouldn't be the first time), and I shouldn't really be interested in my team's private lives, but it seems to me that Kent is lonely. And I speak as one who is familiar with the sensation, who knows how heavy emptiness can be. I've got used to it and come to accept it. But he shouldn't have to. He's still young and, objectively, good-looking, I suppose. He deserves someone, a boyfriend… or a girlfriend, I don't know his preference. And why should I?

He certainly doesn't give the impression of having much of a life outside of work – he can't do, if he has the time to be shopping for birthday presents for me. I was touched that he seemed to have put a certain amount of thought into it, but perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. He is built more of thoughts than of words, and I find I know less and less about him the more I look.

Not that I am looking.

The present itself was thoughtful as well. A filigree picture frame – large enough to hang on the wall, and small enough to stand on a table or mantelpiece. The back of the frame has both a loop of ribbon and a pull-out support, so that I could choose either. Within the frame Kent had already put a photograph of the whole of our team.

"I won't be offended if you want to change the picture, sir," he said, blushing and creasing his face at me. "I only put it in so you weren't just getting the stock photo. And if you don't like it, just… I can easily return it."

I can't quite remember what my response was – I hope I was gracious in accepting it. It is in fact a very beautiful thing – dark and curling like delicate locks of hair around a circular face. From a distance, it looks soft, as though it would blow and shift in the wind. But up close, it is firm and defiant. Just what you need in a support.

It's been a month now and I still don't know where I'm going to put it. Until yesterday, it remained wrapped in its green casing, living in my spare room. But I took it out again last night to look at it, and now it sits on my bedside table, the most prominent thing there. I hadn't seen the photograph before – it must be one of Kent's own. It has a dreamlike quality to it, slightly blurred but not unpleasant for that. Kent has edited it a little, I think, put it into black and white and arranged the light and shade just so. The photograph depicts all of us, but my eyes are drawn to the centre where Kent and I are standing. Maybe it's just my vision, or the way the light falls, but the others, Miles, Mansell, Riley and the rest, seem shrouded in shadow, whilst Kent and I are forced into the limelight. I know I haven't seen this image before, yet it feels familiar to me. Familiar yet backwards, like a reflection in a mirror. Of course, I remember it being taken, but it's strange how viewing yourself through a lens can alter your appearance. It's like a facsimile drawn on different paper, paper with a matte texture that drinks up every blot of ink, extending it with branches and fingers. Am I really that much taller than everyone else? Picture-me seems to loom inaccessibly over my team. Maybe it's I that casts them all into shadow, away up in the distant heights? Only picture-Kent escapes my darkness, lit as he is with his own luminescence. Kent is alone in looking at the camera, as though he was the only one of us who expected the flash. The only one who saw it coming. I suppose he has practice in seeing things before they happen. He's had to – he learned the hard way what happens when you don't. As I looked at Kent's image, glad to see him smiling, my eyes met with my own. I hadn't noticed before that picture-me had his eyes also directed towards Kent, and all four of my eyes met while looking at him.

I've come to realise that I rarely see things approaching.

When I sleep I do not dream, although maybe I did a little last night. I have no memory of it (it too was in monochrome) but I woke with the desire to reciprocate Kent's thoughtfulness – to find a Christmas gift for him that might match this that he has given me. They say things are clearer in sleep.

So here I am.

I have been drifting around the department store for some time now, a rootless itinerant with no map to follow or any real idea where I am aiming. Any landmark, any compass point that may be here is hidden in swathes of reds and greens and bells and candy canes. And the staircases – how can anyone find their way among this forest of steel steps, groaning ahead, swaying and climbing? I notice that one of the escalators has stopped working, its steps paused mid-slide, no longer sure whether they are going up or down. I feel caught in an illusion, like I am trapped in an M. C. Escher drawing, where every flight of stairs seems to lead to another and another, on and on without end. They loom and twist impossibly, upside down and inside out, and I don't know how I'm ever going to find my way.

Something whirrs close to my cheek, ruffling the air on my face, and I realise that I have inadvertently wandered into the children's toy department.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," a woman says to me, her voice straining as tightly as her arms are holding onto her child's hand. With a flustered movement, she picks up the toy helicopter that has landed at my feet and stamps it back onto the shelf behind her. "I've told him he can't have it, but he just won't listen."

She looks genuinely apologetic as her harried eyes take in my buttoned appearance, as though she expects their small incursion into my space to have left an unsightly smudge, like a finger on easily bruised skin. She can tell I'm not supposed to be here. I think anyone with any one of the five senses can tell that. I must reek of unease.

I murmur something appropriately mollifying and carefully tread around to find an exit, looking closely at my feet so as not to step on or trip over any of the small human beings currently making the floor their battleground. But I appear to have taken another wrong course, as I find myself in a sea of plush toys and dolls' houses and things that spin and flash. Half recognisable melodies are recreated in high pitch, in a sound which is a mixture of a bell and a foghorn.

I am sailing dangerously close to the end of a queue of people, a line to which I am certain I do not belong. Anticipation, excitement, leaps from every body there, from the children heaving on the hand of a parent four times their size, to the adults whose tired grimaces don't completely conceal a glow of joy that I can't say I understand. Some yards ahead, the reason for their exhilaration sits enthroned in snowy make-believe, bedecked in scarlet trousers and jacket, and extravagant beard. He and I are the only ones in suits, but we couldn't be more different. I was one of those children who was frightened of Father Christmas, and I still feel a slight nausea at the thought of an old man, however fictional, creeping secretively into my house while I sleep. One of my earliest memories is of lying awake on Christmas night, refusing to succumb to the dead of slumber for fear of a crimson-cloaked intruder creaking open my door and bending his hefty weight beneath the miniature tree in the corner of my room. _He knows when you're awake._ I kept my own tally of the times that I was bad, the times when I failed to live up to the indefinable standard set for me – there was no need for his list. I knew my name would be at the top of it anyway. But here there are children and parents and guardians of all genders and ages, happy and hopeful, who see Santa Claus as some sort of hero. And I am like none of them.

I step away from this column of people, pushing myself free with hands flat and outstretched. I need to make it clear, to myself and to those coming up behind me, that I recognise my mistake. This is not where I intended to be. As I turn to leave, to swim my way back to more a familiar location, I take one more deep look at the festive scene. I gaze upon it like a camera lens, my eyelids flickering like a broken shutter. I am both there and not there. I fancy that much of my life has been carried out offscreen, just behind the lens, just out of shot. There's more control that way. The photographer is the eyes of the photograph, every pixel exists because of them. But they are nowhere to be seen, unless it be in an accidental thumb print or a shadow upon the ground. My career is a different matter – that has been all flash photography and startled cameos and my face careening across tabloids. But my life, where I am me, whatever that is, is angled and filtered just so, to my exact liking. Only I am not really there, not visible unless I waver.

I blink my eyes twice, burning the image of the Santa's grotto onto my brain. Ahead, on the rostrum, one of the actors playing an elf has their back to me. He is bent at the hip, and crouched so that all I can see is a twist of shoulder as he reaches into a sack and plucks out a wrapped gift, as fruit from a tree. The next few seconds happen all at once. There is a spinning of standing, a toe-led upward motion, during which the present somehow passes from the elf's hands to those of a young girl stood beside him. Then another spin, which manifests as a dizziness in which my ears and my feet communicate, but nothing in between, and the elf is looking directly at me. His eyes narrow, then widen, and my chest does the same. We're both unmoving as a picture, our eyes capturing our opposite images – his of me and mine of him. I wonder what he sees? If I could I would put into words the information that my retinas are printing on my brain but language has deserted me. My head's like an abstract painting all jumbled and messy and up in a muddle like my words. Perspective and punctuation are what I need and I have neither. There's a familiar shock of corkscrew hair and it's Kent there's a mouth and it's upended and open between two lips and it's Emerson Kent there's a hand and another one with slender fingers scouring at his forehead and it's Kent it's Kent I can't stop looking it's Kent and I don't know where to look it's Ke…

My eyes are stinging and I realise I haven't blinked for some time. The first closure of my eyelids is dry and watery at the same time and it's this, this, surely it must be this that refocuses what I see. I'll open my eyes and it won't be Kent, will it? No, it'll just be someone with a similar curl to his hair, someone else, someone not Kent. My eyelids scratch open again. It's a reset alright, a reframing perhaps, but not in the way I had imagined. A sudden flicker, a snap and a click and everything seems different, like I'm seeing myself for the first time and Kent for the first time and we're in separate frames but the same one concurrently. I am both the photographer and the image, both the seeing and the seen. It makes no sense, and I don't understand it, but there it is nonetheless.

It's his clothes that I can't seem to stop looking at now. This ridiculous and tawdry elf costume has kidnapped my attention and held it hostage, burning its negative into my brain. It's the colours perhaps, the primary brightness of the palette, which offset with Kent's pale complexion creates a pleasing juxtaposition. I feel like a man who has only seen the world in black and white until this moment, and am now dominated and submerged by all these new, nameless and unencountered hues. I'm being blinded by too much sight. My head, and my whole body following it, tumbles into the kaleidoscope before me. The different shades scintillate, moving sensuously, rutting and grinding together in a shocking blur. It's like the colours are solid, solider than I am even, and each time they rub against each other they set off a new spark which pulverises them just a little bit more into inkdust. It's terrifying and exhilarating and ludicrous, and I have no idea how I fit into it. Perhaps I don't know myself at all.

There's a lingering crinkled taste in my mouth, like burnt paper – a photograph on fire, its edges curling, its pigments boiling as it is consumed by flame. It licks its way down my throat and is swallowed, leaving a rainbow ash on my tongue. Eventually, my senses clear and I can see beyond solely colours. I start to discern scale and shape and form. Kent's clothes, for example, are… fascinating. They are tight, though not obscenely so. Not inappropriate for the time or place, but enough to invite the imagination. My imagination. And I can no longer deny that I've been imagining, can I? All those times that I told myself I was just wishing him well, I was also wishing him, well, myself with him wasn't I? The picture I believed I had in my head for him, a picture of companionship, of someone for him, has shifted and been redrawn. When I said that he should have a boyfriend… didn't I really mean… wasn't I hoping, just hoping, that that boyfriend might be me?

Oh Jesus Christ, what am I doing? I can't do this. I can't have this, can I? There are so many countless reasons why this is wrong. My verbal mind strains to assert control, throwing up its hard worn boundaries of words, reasons, excuses. But my visual mind refuses to listen and wanders, lingering over Kent's contours as though it had never experienced a curve before.

You cannot do this. You are his boss.

But just imagine those curves turned to liquid in your hands, running through your fingers like fresh paint…

Oh hell, I think I'm going to be sick.


	2. Chapter 2

Some while later (I seem to have left some minutes behind me tangled around Kent's body as I tripped and stumbled out of the children's department, so I am not sure quite how much time has passed) I find myself blinking in the middle of the giftware section. A yellow-sharp stabbing still needles at the back of my throat, sitting atop the billows of nausea that continue to swell and push useless air to the front of my mouth. I exhale fatly through my lips and I feel a little more relaxed, although the image of Kent in that costume still burns on my inner sight, upside down and back to front. There isn't as much colour here, or at least what colour there is remains on the shelves and in the displays. None of it explodes inside me or drowns my eyes. It's all well-behaved and under control, muted, breathable, pastels. Strangely I find I miss the chaos.

I'm tempted to leave now and go home, where Kent won't follow me except in my mind. Yes, there's that picture he gave me – that'll have to be moved. It shouldn't be too bad, anyway. He's fixed safely behind glass there, where I can't touch him. Not that I want to touch him. I don't. I _can't_. And then tomorrow, at work, he'll be behind glass again. Or rather I will be, clicked and clasped securely within my office. We will never speak of it. He will stay just an image, a picture, with me as observer only. That is the only safe way. I think back to the last time I watched Kent through the reflective windows of my office. _Saw_ him, I saw him – I wasn't _watching_. I saw him at his desk, the glow of his computer screen beaming into his face like floodlights. I saw how the overhead strip lighting rocked back and forth, nudged by the air as the Incident Room door opened. The light rowed itself across Kent's face, casting ever-moving, ever-changing shadows that seemed to give a suggestion of motion, like a picture urged to life, even though Kent's features were perfectly still. I saw the daylight from the window blow brightness into the back of his head, and all three light sources cupped him between them creating an impromptu portrait, possessive and dazzling and overexposed.

"Can I help you, sir?"

The honorific startles me (I'm too used to it being spoken in a different context, a shy whisper or tentative question) until I realise that it is a saleswoman, official and uniform-like in the grey and cream of the store's brand, who stands before me. She is neither shy nor tentative, a tailored and trained assurance slips from her crafted gestures.

"Do you need any help at all?" she says again, perfectly choreographed, her eyebrows raised and head cocked in the dotted arch of a question mark.

Her question is superfluous – I am beyond help.

"I'm just browsing… looking… for a present, a Christmas present. For a friend, a special friend, of mine," I say, the words thumping out of my mouth. I wince as I listen back to them in my head. A special friend – why the hell did I say that? Now she's going to think…

"Well, I'm sure I can help," she says, beckoning for me to follow her. "What sort of thing does she like?"

" _He_. He likes…" It seems important to emphasise Kent's masculinity, for some reason, even though that damn costume has already done quite enough of that already. Oh god… "I don't know what he likes." My voice tiptoes now, mirroring my footsteps.

She suggests the usual generic men's gifts – cufflinks or a tie. Beautifully unimaginative. I pretend to consider them, but I have already discounted them. They are simply not possible. Had it been yesterday, perhaps they would have been suitable. They would have completed the picture of Kent, the diligent and well-turned-out officer that I knew. The ideal finishing touches, just a glaze or a gloss. But now… these accessories, fastenings, the cufflinks that bind, the tie that drapes, they would sit next to or near Kent's skin throughout the day and be removed by him at night. I cannot go through my working day wondering whether he would remove the tie methodically, unpicking its knot like a boy scout, or whether he would yank it from his neck in a single messy motion. I cannot sit at my desk and concentrate all the while imagining the click of the cufflinks as he snaps them open, off his wrists and onto the nightstand. I cannot be a responsible senior officer if I am constantly thinking about the blank canvas of skin that lies underneath.

In the end I concentrate on a less threatening part of Kent's anatomy, though that is all relative now. With this new incomplete and unfinished image of Kent in my mind, every hair follicle, every tendon can be fashioned in sedition. Every limb can be drawn in some performance which I shouldn't picture. But perhaps his fingers, ink smudged and soft, are as safe as anything. And so a pen it is. A firm steel ballpoint that may still issue its liquid over the hand that holds it. The hand that will grip the shaft with determination, and direct the nib… Hell, maybe fingers aren't so safe after all. But it's too late now, as the saleswoman hands me the pen, gift wrapped and tied up. She's doing her best, I realise that, trying to complete the purchase by presenting it to me finished and perfected. She thinks that's what I want. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have said that that was what I wanted. The problem is I no longer know. Perfection is no longer perfect, neatness is no longer neat. I see what lies underneath the façade, the cracks beneath the fresh paint, the pallor under the flattering filter. I have always known it was there and I can disguise it no longer. I'm not sure I even want to.

My hand shakes as I attempt to straighten my tie and take my leave from the shop assistant all at once. My other hand grips tightly onto the bag containing Kent's gift. My skin stretches over the bones of my hand, becoming almost transparent in its attempt to keep my veins in place. They show through anyway, like spilt ink refusing to hide. I almost fear that the pen I have bought for Kent has leaked already, and stakes its claim on my hand. And what am I to do with it, this thing that I have bought but which does not belong to me? There are still several days etched onto the calendar between now and Christmas Day. I can see just how it'll be. It will sit under my bed, hidden but present, like Mona Lisa's smile. I can foresee my incredulity, that something so small can sit so large in my consciousness. Even through layers of sheets, mattress, stale air and packaging, it will point at me. Teasing me. I sleep on my front and there it will be. Scrawling its signature upon my dreams.

"Sir?"

The background and foreground blur into a circle as I startle around. I am suddenly facing the opposite direction. It's him. I would know that voice anywhere, saying that word in that way. Like it sits in his mouth softly awaiting its chance to spring from his tongue and slide into my ear. His voice has always been familiar to me. Safe. It's his appearance that now terrifies me. Thankfully he has changed out of that elf costume. Those yellow tights hang over his elbow, no longer clinging to his limbs but slick like soft butter running down his arm. He's not fully re-dressed though, and I can't help but notice the fourth button on his polo shirt sitting half in its hole, poking out like a tongue through lips. The upper buttons are not even trying to hold together. His collar creates a cotton frame, arrow shaped, around his clavicle as his neck journeys down towards his chest. My eyes follow it. A dangerous descent.

"Kent." The words creep through my teeth. How is it that I can no longer say his name without picturing it being breathed into his mouth or bitten into his neck? (I still can't look away from his collarbone…)

I think he notices my slight recoil, judging by the way his forehead folds with confused pain.

"Sir?" he says again, the question heavy in his voice.

"Don't call me Sir," I say, "not here. Not… not like this."

Not now. Not anymore.

"Not like what, si…?" The hesitancy is worse. "I'm sorry, I don't really know what else to call you."

Call me Joe, I want to say. "It wasn't supposed to be like this," I whisper instead. " _I'm_ not supposed to be like this."

That confusion again displays on his face. Only silenced, for I have forbidden him the word he would say. Speechless bewilderment, an image of my own thoughts. Instead he points, michaelangelically, at the bag clenched in my hand. I feel the bag, or rather its contents, indicating back, a line being written in the air between his finger and the pen.

"Been doing a bit of shopping, then?" he says. "To be honest, this is the last place I'd expect to find you."

Conversation. Light-hearted chat. Yes, I can do that. Presenting a front, a veneer to hide behind.

"I… umm… I wouldn't have thought that yellow was your colour," I say, motioning towards the tights still looped around his arm.

His face is washed in a deep red, as though the scarlet tinsel that surrounds us is reflected on it. My own burns with a matching virulent heat.

"Oh, these?" He gives the offending items such a glance that I half expect the toes to curl. "I just volunteer a bit each Christmas for the Santa's grotto here, raising money for the children's hospital where my mum used to work. It's a nice way to spend a few hours, I guess, dressing up like someone else for a while. And it makes people happy, I hope."

Perhaps he notices me gazing at the triangle of his chest, for his free hand spiders up to his open buttons and hurriedly knits them back together. He still seems unfinished, in comparison with his usual appearance. A portrait with missing details – there is no space for a tie, his waistcoat and jacket abandoned. He looks well in everything he wears, from the jeans and hoodie he wore when we first met to his frankly alarming get-up in the Hooded Crow. (It's only now that I realise _why_ I was so disturbed by it.) But the day he first wore a suit, all three pieces fitted snugly like a completed jigsaw. It made me happy, I think, to see him like that. I certainly felt my own suit hug me from behind, the buttons on my waistcoat tucking me in safely like a lover within bedsheets. I thought at the time that that was an odd reaction to have.

"I don't doubt it," I say.

There's a strange pounding in my ears, almost akin to knocking. Kent is speaking but I don't hear properly, like he is speaking from behind glass. Something about having to pick up dry cleaning? His shoulders, one tucked up to neatly balance beneath his curly hair, edge away from me. I reach out but I can't touch him. My fingers clutch onto cold air that seems to whistle through my fingernails and there is a papery thump as the gift bag I was holding slaps against the floor. It shuffles slightly and comes to settle in the dead centre of one of the floor tiles. Kent's feet and mine spiral towards it as though we are following the path of a snail's shell. A shadow passes over the cardboard and ribbons, a golden light winking briefly in its wake.

Kent gets there first. (I suspect that is nothing new.) The furtive leap of his aftershave surprises my nostrils as he bends down before me. The heart is alcoholic and herbal but the top notes are obscured by a chalky residue of stage paint that clamours down his neck.

His spine cricks to a stand. "Here you go, sir," he says, inclining the package towards me.

My lips and eyes tense with a sharp pull into a grimace. Kent's face is a parallel a second earlier. Is that to catch himself from calling me 'sir', or is it related to the way his left hand massages the small of his back and buttocks? I don't like to ask. I think I would not want the answer.

"No, keep it," I say, croaking like a stuck animal. "I don't want it. It's yours."

"Jo… si… sorry?"

He holds it out by the tips of his fingers. His thumb flutters at the handle, wisping at the two sides of the satin like a butterfly's wing. I am torn between two senses. Do I touch, to test if Kent's skin is as soft as ribbon, or do I look only, engrave the image on my mind and walk away?

"I bought it for you. I mean… you were kind enough to… I just wanted…" All of my breath expels in one swift cough that scratches punishingly at my throat. "Merry Christmas, Kent."

The wind outside rips into my skin like a knife through canvas before I even realise that I didn't wait for his answer.

* * *

The next day is Sunday. The last Sunday before Christmas, and everything crackles with anticipation. My calendar, for some reason replete with all the dates of the Christian year, gives today as Advent Four. Advent – it's an impending sort of word, I've always found. Its vowels spread out like the candles chasing each other round and around the advent wreath, waiting for what is to come.

There's a crisp knock at my front door, curt and questioning. Followed by two more, slightly higher in pitch, as though the striker hesitated and came back with a new insistence. Despite the coldness of the door handle, it glints goldenly almost in invitation as I grapple it between my fingers to wrest open the door.

He's facing away from me, at first. The back of his head is covered by some sort of hood, but I know it's him. I could view him blurred, in silhouette or shadow, and I think now I would always recognise him.

"Kent," I say, my vocal notes shaping themselves into surprise, although I realise now that I was expecting this.

He turns to face me, framed in the doorway. He is dressed more or less as he was when I last saw him – a university hoodie covers his polo shirt, leaving just a suggestion of an open-buttoned collar underneath. He no longer looks unfinished. This is Kent, uncostumed, unpretending. Not an image of someone else, but his own self portrait and perfect.

I don't remember inviting him in, exactly. Only that one minute he is over there, beyond the threshold, the next he is here. In my living room, his socks sliding on my floor. And it feels right.

"I see you still haven't put any pictures up," he comments, head twisting round.

"No, I… I only really have one that I like. And I haven't decided where it should be, yet."

We've skipped something. There should have been offers of tea, _please make yourself comfortable_ 's, conversations about the weather, before I felt so relaxed having him here. But it feels as though we are re-enacting something that took place a long time ago. We're just giving life to the icon, filling a picture with motion.

"I was just passing, and I wanted to give you this," he says, handing me a bright yellow envelope. The card is stiff, but with just a little flex in it. Just enough. A single word is inscribed on the front: _Joe._ I take pleasure in his handwriting like never before. It makes my name stand out, look like more than just letters, as the ink from his fingers claimed this card for me. My pleasure grows as I think that soon he will have a new instrument for his writing.

"Thank you, Kent," I say, clearing the mass of buttery phlegm from my throat. It disappears with a swallow.

"No, sir. Thank _you_ ," he replies, his eyes delving into mine.

"What on earth for?"

"For… for not just treating me like a kid the way everyone else does. For taking me seriously, giving me chances to prove myself. For the time you realised I was getting a bit freaked out by one of the cases and you reassured me." He stops, shudders in a mouthful of air. "Thank you for _seeing_ me."

"Well," I say, my mouth as waterless as crackling paint, "you have always seen me. From the beginning, I think. And I… I cannot fully express my gratitude."

I fear I may have said too much. There's a pause, a stilted petrified pause, as though we are frozen by my words in our places. Once again fixed into position like characters in a painting. Kent is the first to move, as he always has been.

"Umm… sir?" he says, stepping forward. "It's… well, all my flatmates are going to be away over Christmas, and Erica's going to be with Mansell and his lot, and they asked if I wanted to go over there, but to be honest, a whole day with Mansell?" He laughs, and I realise as his rippling voice runs along my shoulders and down my back that I haven't heard him laugh so freely for a long time.

"And I've got this stupidly big Christmas tree at my flat," he continues, "that Marcie made us get, and I've put your present under it, but it's going to be bloody depressing opening it on my own."

I chance a small smile at him, in my head imagining him wallowing in the scent of pine needles, sharp and clean.

"Joe?" he says, his chin hiding his mouth, although his picturesque eyes return my smile. "Would you like to spend Christmas Day with me?"

 **A/N: Thank you for bearing with me while I finished this. It took a lot longer than it should have done for various reasons.**

 **Special thanks to Queenofhearts1985 for beta'ing and generally keeping me going. xxx**


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